The Media, Extremists and Conspiracies

March 8, 2010

A story by Kenneth P. Vogel in the Politico, under the headline, “Conservatives Target Their Own Fringe,” insists that “the conservative establishment” is launching a purge of “extremist elements” from the conservative movement. However, these extremists are conspicuously not identified in the article as the “gay conservatives” who co-sponsored the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). These are the “anal sex practitioners,” as Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus prefers to calls them.

This Phillips term is not intended to demean anyone; it is descriptive of what male homosexuals do. Such unnatural and extreme behavior, in addition to being dangerous, makes a mockery of the traditional moral and religious values that conservatives hold dear.

Vogel, however, claims the homosexuals were actually welcomed, by virtue of the fact that there was “jeering” of “an anti-gay activist at CPAC who condemned organizers for inviting gay Republican group GOProud to participate.”

What he ignores is the evidence that the “jeering” came mostly from non-conservatives, many of them libertarians, and that the “anti-gay activist,” Ryan Sorba of Young Americans for Freedom, was rebutting a pro-gay speaker, a leader of a group who told me he wasn’t a conservative in the first place.

To clear things up for Kenneth Vogel and others in the media, let us make it clear that a true conservative like Howard Phillips, who has been a leader in the conservative movement for several decades, understands that conservatism means traditional moral and religious values, a strong national defense, and economic freedom. There is nothing complicated or confusing about it. The homosexual movement, founded by a member of the Communist Party by the name of Harry Hay, simply doesn’t qualify for admission, no matter how many libertarians in the CPAC audience may applaud for GOProud or jeer Ryan Sorba.

In order to purge the conservative movement of its extremists, CPAC will have to remove its own organizers who let them in.

The story ignores the real problem of how the “conservative establishment” -- in the form of the CPAC organizers -- picked actual and real extremists to co-sponsor their event. And those were the self-described “gay conservatives” who reject the social conservatism that has been an essential part of the conservative movement. The well-established and well-known Family Research Council pulled out of CPAC because CPAC organizer David Keene decided to allow GOProud, a relatively new organization that works for the election of “centrist” and liberal Republicans, into the event. But this mistake is overlooked by Vogel.

The “conservative establishment” is not defined in the Vogel article, but the “extremists” are said to be the “birther, truther or militia movements or the John Birch Society.”

According to Vogel, whose story is about ferreting out alleged extremists from the conservative ranks, there is a “new approach” to purging these elements but it has “drawbacks” that were said to be on display at CPAC, such as the inclusion of John Birch Society as a co-sponsor. Vogel added, “And while conference organizers nixed a panel on Obama’s citizenship, a birther contingent still made its presence felt, as did the Oath Keepers, who co-sponsored the conference.”

Vogel describes the Oath Keepers as a “militia-linked group,” an obvious effort to tie them to the armed citizen organizations blamed by some for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. But his evidence is a New York Times article describing Oath Keepers as “a new player in a resurgent militia movement.” This article, in turn, talks about “informal ties” between the groups, whatever that means.

Of far more serious concern is close collaboration between the Oath Keepers and radio host Alex Jones, who has become a favorite of Russian television and actually went on the Russia Today network to defend the Kremlin’s invasion of the independent state of Georgia . (More on this in the second part of this series).

The “birther” presence at CPAC was said to be, through the link in Vogel’s story, one “Philip J. Berg, a Pennsylvania lawyer and Hillary Clinton supporter,” who has demanded documentation in court of Obama’s U.S. citizenship and was at CPAC. So the “birther” movement actually crosses ideological lines.

The John Birch Society (JBS), which tends to be known for a conspiracy view of history, is said to be an organization that must be purged from the conservative movement. MSNBC-TV lesbian commentator Rachel Maddow, who would never do a story about how Communist Harry Hay founded the gay rights movement, hammered away at JBS co-sponsorship of CPAC because, she said, the JBS believes in too many conspiracies about communist plots.

To begin with, as we all know, political conspiracies do exist. That is why scandals happen. If anybody wants evidence of a political conspiracy, they should look no further than Michael Calderone’s 1500-word Politico story about how former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards concealed and lied about his adulterous affair. The major media failure to vet Edwards “is worrisome in a changed political world where politicians - be they Barack Obama or Sarah Palin - can burst upon the national stage and seemingly overnight become candidates for higher office,” Calderone argues.

The difference, of course, is that Palin was savaged and scrutinized by the media while Obama was given a pass on such matters as his mentoring by Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and Davis’s 600-page FBI file. Our media didn’t and don’t want to go there.

Communism was and is a conspiracy. Without commenting on every charge made by the JBS or its leaders over the years, its central claim -- that U.S. leaders are working with the communists and others to lay the groundwork for world government – cannot be dismissed out of hand. Objectively speaking, one has to admit that talk of global taxes and world government is frequently in the news and cannot be said to be the fantasies of the “black helicopter” crowd. Even the Pope has stated his belief in a “World Political Authority.” His own Vatican newspaper published a favorable review of Marxist theory.

At this late date, no one can seriously doubt that a “New World Order” of some kind is coming into being. The real questions are to what extent it is being deliberately designed to subvert America ’s standing in the world and the American way of life, and what role President Obama is playing in it.

Critics of the JBS have to concede the organization has been on the right track about an emerging world government.

On the matter of the so-called truthers and birthers, these are two entirely different issues. People at 9/11 “truth movement” gatherings are from both the right and left. They include talk show host Alex Jones, supposedly on the right, and communist Van Jones, on the left. They share a deep suspicion of government being dominated by corporations and intelligence agencies, which are supposed to be pulling the strings behind the scenes.

In the case of 9/11, however, there is abundant evidence of a massive intelligence failure that led to the Muslim attacks. The real question is whether the mistakes have been corrected and whether government officials responsible for this intelligence failure have been held accountable. The answer to that is clearly no.

The 9/11 “truthers” ignore the fact that, if U.S. officials orchestrated 9/11, why couldn't these same officials have planted weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to justify the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime? That would have been relatively easy, compared to the complicated and elaborate schemes required to strike the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and then to blame the attacks on Muslims hijacking U.S. commercial aircraft.

While conservatives are being urged to purge “truthers” from their ranks, “truther” Van Jones is returning to the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress (CAP), which has supplied personnel and ideas to the Obama Administration. Indeed, Jones worked previously for CAP before he went to his White House job.

The “birther” issue is quite different. In his piece, Vogel defines birthers as “conservatives who believe that Obama was not born in the United States and is, therefore, ineligible to be president.” As we have seen, however, the “birther” at CPAC cited in his article is a Hillary Clinton Democrat.

This is an issue that crosses ideological lines because honest liberals recognize the simple fact that the copy of the birth certificate released by the Obama campaign is lacking in basic and essential information about who attended the birth and what hospital it took place in. One of the prominent skeptics regarding the authenticity of this document is former CIA officer Larry Johnson, a supporter of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primaries..

Glenn Beck has said brief newspaper notices about Obama’s birth add to the evidence that he was indeed born in Hawaii. But they, too, are lacking in essential information as well, such as the name of hospital and attending physician.

By releasing a copy of my own birth certificate, I have tried to demonstrate what other necessary information is lacking about Obama’s birth. The only way to address these questions is to identify where exactly he was born, in what hospital, and what doctor was present. All of this information should be on an original birth certificate. There is some unexplained reason why this document has not been released. That is why the “birther” issue is still legitimate and why Beck and others should not cavalierly dismiss those like Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily who are willing to keep asking the hard questions.

So-called “conservatives” in the media, such as those mentioned in the Vogel Politico story who refuse to tolerate even the asking of serious questions about Obama’s background, have either been intimidated by the liberal/left or are afraid of doing the hard work required to get answers. In any case, they are not part of any “conservative establishment” and have no claim of influence over the conservative media as a whole. Indeed, they give conservative journalism a bad name.

Coming up in Part Two: Alex Jones, Russian Television, and the Oath Keepers

Cliff Kincaid is the director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism. Cliff regularly appears on television and radio programs, including the CBS Evening News, NBC’s Today Show, Lou Dobbs Tonight, The Glenn Beck Show, Fox and Friends, The O’Reilly Factor, and more. He has co-authored several books, which you can purchase from the links below.